


Three Halloweens

by sapphire_child



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Community: then_theres_us, F/M, Fluff, Halloween, Pete's World, Pete's World Torchwood, Pumpkins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-24
Updated: 2010-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-28 20:57:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12615348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphire_child/pseuds/sapphire_child
Summary: Rose spends her first Halloween hiding in a corner at the Torchwood party and drinking herself into a small stupor. There’s nobody there to appreciate the irony of the costume she wears, and altogether too many people who are over appreciative of the length of her skirt.





	Three Halloweens

Halloween turns out to be a pretty big deal in Pete’s World. Rose is incredulous the first year, when she receives an invitation to the annual Torchwood Halloween Party.

“What’s this?” she protests, sliding it across Pete’s desk with her fingertips, like it might contaminate her with its festive _orangeness_.

Pete raises his eyebrows at her. “An invitation?” he guesses, nonplussed.

“‘The annual Torchwood Halloween Party’?” Rose snatches it back to read it and then stares at him with all the incredulity she can muster. “Serious?”

Pete huffs. “It wasn’t my idea. Somebody in PR thought it’d be a nice gimmick. Everyone else makes such a fuss about the stupid holiday. Can’t say I blame them – it’s the only night all year the curfew’s lifted.”

“So a bunch of alien experts all get together and play dress ups while the rest of the country go doorknocking for candy?”

“Or drink themselves stupid at the pub, yes.”

And so Rose spends her first Halloween hiding in a corner at the Torchwood party and drinking herself into a small stupor. There’s nobody there to appreciate the irony of the costume she wears, and altogether too many people who are over appreciative of the length of her skirt.

She remains anonymous and alone that night, the hood of her red cloak pulled up to hide her telltale blonde locks and her tear stained cheeks.

~*~

  
Halloween is little Tony’s favourite holiday, second only to Christmas. At the tender age of three and a half, sweets hold more sway over him than toys – the gratification of sugar both instant and fleeting. Toys break or he becomes bored with them, moves on from them.

Sugar? Sugar is endless and forever and Rose knows all about the allure of something endless and forever.

She takes him trick-or-treating so that Jackie and Pete can attend another function. With her masked up and Tony draped in a sheet (he’d been planning his costume since he first saw _Casper_ on the telly the previous Halloween) they creep from unsuspecting door to unsuspecting door begging sweets.

Rose is endlessly grateful for her mask. She doesn’t think she could cope with any more public scrutiny than she already has to deal with, and Tony’s sheet effectively hides his distinctly noticeable mop of bright orange hair. Nobody seems to realise who they are and the car is quick to whisk them away home at the end of the night.

Back at the mansion she helps her little brother sort all of his many sweets out into little piles. Charitably, he offers to share. But after choking down one chocolate bar she refuses to take anymore from him.

She doesn’t really want to try and explain to him that it tastes more like ash than confection to her.

~*~

  
The Doctor doesn’t get what all the fuss is in the lead up to Halloween until Rose manages to find five minutes to explain to him just how big it is here. Being the Doctor, he goes completely overboard and takes up a new hobby – carving pumpkins.

Soon their entire flat is full of flickering orange lanterns. To boot, their fridge is full of soup, pie and juice from the flesh and there are pumpkin seeds drying on every available window ledge (for what purpose she doesn’t know).

Rose is busy with work all the way up to the night itself – so busy that she forgets to organise a proper costume until it’s far too late. She hires something nondescript even as she wishes latently for a pink poodle skirt and then cries just a little when she discovers that he’s already hired one for her and combed his hair up into a ridiculously high coif.

Together they head out onto the street and surprise more than one person by knocking on their door and begging for sweets. They laugh and they charm and they knock the socks off anyone and everyone – especially those who have seen endless tabloid photographs of the Vitex heiress looking quietly forlorn and altogether quite lonely.

The next day there is a two page spread in _The Sun_ , a collection of photographs from the festivities of the night before accompanying an article about the upcoming abolition of the curfew laws. _Halloween_ , it reads triumphantly. _Will no longer be the only night of the year that people can go out and have a little fun!_

In the very bottom corner is a slightly blurred picture of two of the costumed revellers, taken by a budding young photographer whose career has been all but made in one click of a button.

She receives an enormous fee for the two other snapshots she took of the Vitex heiress and her mysterious beau when they visited her door.

“Nice to see you smiling for once,” Pete comments mildly when he shows the spread to Rose.

In response she dumps about ten litres of pumpkin soup encased in Tupperware onto his desk.

“Yeah, well you need to take some of this soup home. Feed it to the other people who work here. _Something_.” She says, with real desperation. “The Christmas decorations are starting to go up in the shops already and the Doctor’s talking about _Turkeys..._ ”


End file.
